Several Newbie Questions

I've read some of the archives, and this list looks pretty friendly. I'd be grateful for some help. I've been running XWiki for about two weeks and plan to use it for work. The PDF and RSS features are outstanding! I've also spend a lot of time looking at the xwiki.org site and the FAQs on xwiki.com, looking for answers and finding some good ones Now the list of questions: Skins I'd really like to change the look of the site. There's an FAQ for creating skins, but I can only see it in French. Unfortunately, I don't read French. Is there an English language version? I did manage to get Google to try to translate the document, but it wasn't really readable. Comments preferences I found the FAQ on reversing comments order. Either I missed something, or it wasn't clear whether I was supposed to directly edit comments2.vm in the templates dir, or paste the contents of the file into the "Comments" area for the default skin. So I did the pasting and modified the code there with good results. So it appears that if your current skin object doesn't have anything defined for a particular property, it defaults to the file in the templates directory. Is this true? Next question is about preferences. Looking deeper at the code for comments2.vm, there are calls to $xwiki.getWebPreference to retrieve values for "showcomments" and "commentsorder". Where and how are these preference values defined? I search xwiki.org, the FAQ, and Googled, with no luck. Email registration verification Okay, I found the setting for using email verification of registrations by going to XWiki preference, registration. Do these settings do anything yet? I tried turning them on, but it doesn't appear to change anything about the registration process. I'm on 0.9.840. I have many more questions, but that's probably too many already. Thanks in advance, </CR> -- Chris Rigsby Systems Architect, Enterprise Application Systems University of Minnesota rigsb007(a)umn.edu * 612/624-5334